@luckytran I have been in many cemeteries, this is true. There's a small one near where I live of a local family and it is the saddest one I've seen. All the children (5) from birth to 20 died. This was in the 1880s. The mother's headstone literally has "Died from a Broken Heart".

@luckytran I'm old enough to have had relatives living with post-polio syndrome, and stories of an aunt who died of an infection in her teens and another aunt that died of childbirth fever.

@luckytran I’ve been. Yup.

@luckytran Yup! In my elementary classes during the 50s they would pull all of us out of class, line us up, and give us the shot in the arm. No parents freaking out over these free vac shots, ever.

@luckytran And people incorrectly think “the average lifespan was only 30 years, people lived such short lives!” If you made it to adulthood, you likely lived into your 60s or more. The “not making it to adulthood” is what really tanked humanity’s average lifespan.

@luckytran I almost died of measles at the age of 4. In 1962.

@luckytran

A Brief History of Vaccination

:mastodon:

https://www.who.int/news-room/spotlight/history-of-vaccination/a-brief-history-of-vaccination

@luckytran
enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/@thosethatcan

@luckytran During the influenza epidemic (before any vaccines), newspapers reminded people not just to wash their hands and wear masks, but to only take advice from real doctors.

@luckytran Better nutrition, improved living conditions also helped along with advances in Medicine, including care of expectant mothers. Vaccines are important but they’re not the only factor.

@luckytran Funny how that works.

@luckytran And we can easily overlook the power of antibiotics to deal with what were killers in the 19th C, such as scarlet fever.

@luckytran
I spend more time in old graveyards than I care to admit while making history videos, and I can definitely confirm that old gravestones have a lot of dead children under them 😞

@luckytran I'm starting to feel sorry for the anti-vaxxer lemmings folowing some charlatan right over the cliff of infection.
Maybe it's time the most vulnerable and immune compromised sue these purveyors of disinformation for malicious neglect causing bodily harm for their refusal to protect others from their rampant studpidity

@luckytran One of the reasons people had so many children. So many died in infancy.
As soon as vaccines were available for polio, measles, diphtheria, and whooping cough, my Mum was there to get us our needles. She'd seen what damage they could do.

@luckytran Absolutely. I maintain an old #cemetery and this monument in particular always gets me. 6 children, most of their ages measured in months. And just across from here we have 9 tiny tablet monuments for 9 children killed by the Spanish flu epidemic.

@luckytran
Diphtheria was a killer before that vax, which started being used around 1900. It was so contagious that they'd bury the victims the same day.

@luckytran @howelloneill there have to be more of us who care about not living in this vile world being built.

@luckytran Girls & women received informal training in practical nursing. My Mom in the 1950s was kind of cold & indifferent but if one of us kids got sick we had her attention. Vitals monitored, fluids pushed, favorite foods offered, a bell to ring if we needed her.

I don’t know how working parents today would be able to care for a child with mumps, measles, chickenpox, whooping cough, or diphtheria